Blogs from Ecuador, South America - page 654

No surprises there. I tried counting in the shower on the final day, but gave up at 45, and I hadn´t even got to my left leg, which has a bumper crop. As if this weren´t enough, I also have three splinters and also one bite on my face (no less) which has got a bit infected and is really rather unsightly. I also forgot to take my malaria tablet one day (damn it damn it, another 3 pounds down the drain) and I´ll probably start having fits soon. So, it wasn´t exactly good for my health. It was, however, just good. Proper good, in fact. I´d forgotten how much I´ve been wanting to go to the rainforest (rainforest, jungle, they´re interchangeable) since I was old enough to want to go to places. Actually, yeah, it ... read more

Greetings my friends, tis Rich. well, weve done quite a lot lately, and have finished school. Alas, Equipo de Fausto is no more! Now that i can prove comprehensively that i cannot speak spanish, we have decamped to tena, via baños, for the Kayak school. NMore to cvome on that soon(ish). We left Cuenca in style, and in the same vein that we occupied it........drunk. An al night bender with our favouritwe barstaff playing cards was a good way to see out our time there, but missing most of the last day of class was not, and neither was a nine our bus journey with alcohol poisoning. Hohum. On our last day we visited somwe Inca ruins, where 60,000 people were massacred by the victor after a huge battle of the civil war that raged while ... read more

Where they don´t have computers. Or antidotes, apparently, because they would have to be refridgerated, and they don´t have refridgerators. So if some horrible poison frog bites you, you have to get into a canoe and begin the 9 hour journey back to civilisation. Unless this happens to me, I´ll be back in the middle of Saturday night. I´ll have seen more animals (you´d think I´d have had enough of animals, but it seems not), including pink dolphins and birds, and I´ll have lazed in hammocks. I´ll surely have been bitten to pieces as well. The best bit is, I´m going to able to take some of my enormous supply of malaria tablets, which I spent three days´wages on and have so far just carried around with me. Then I´ll be in Bogota not long after ... read more

Whew! We have been suitably chastised by a number of you for not writing often enough...and the year has just begun. What a week. The first Friday of work was a blast...apparently the town we are working in has a week-long fiesta celebrating the independence of the area - "The Fiesta De Colta". This fiesta just ended on August 2nd after 10-14 days of havoc. That friday (the 20th) we finished work with the field crew and decided to share some beers with everyone....well, 30 beers later we exited the site feeling refreshed, and managed to literally walk into a very colourful parade down the Pan-American highway and through the centre of town. Our Ecuadorian friends decided a parade just wasn´t a parade without a couple boxes of fruity wine and the liquor of choice down ... read more

Its Rich calling and oh yes, i have a camera. And i didnt need to sell a kidney to get it, although I could have live here for a month on that money. Ah well, the moral to this story is don´t put delicate electronics in rivers. Lots of fun has been had of late, and after four weeks of intensive language tuition i have learned one thing above all else. I cant speak Spanish, although I´m getting pretty good at Spanglish. Now when i try to converse with the locals they insult me in Spanish! Hooray! Update for Friday. In the morning I endured a visit to a Panama hat factory. Here we witnessed the really quite impressive spectacle of people hand making hats, at huge cost in man hours, for people to buy without ... read more